SOURCE: Wright, Richard. Eight Men, with an introduction by Paul
Gilroy (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), pp. 19-84. (Book originally published
1961. Final version of story originally published in 1945. First of several
drafts written in 1942. Early version of the story published in 1942.)

Secondary Literature

Miller, Eugene E. Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

This is one of my favorite books on Wright. The author ventures into some
eccentricities, in the process of linking Wright to voodoo, Twain, Reich,
et al, but the materialespecially unpublished manuscriptsthat
Miller analyzes is priceless. Wright negotiates the relationship between folk
consciousness and his highly developed individual consciousness. Though vehemently
rejecting the superstitious religious mind, Wright finds "something"beyond
religionin the psyches of black Americans, Africans, and all primal
peoples, a sensibility he strives to elucidate, from his early writing to
his final engagement with haiku. "The Man Who Lived Underground"
(MWLU) is central to this book, as is Wright's unpublished essay "Memories
of My Grandmother." Wright's engagement with literary modernism, the
avant-garde, surrealism, and other non-naturalistic literary modes is crystallized
in an unpublished manuscript "Personalism" (1935-7), revealing a
sophisticated perspective foreign to the prescribed proletarian literature
of the time.

In-depth analysis of MWLU is concentrated in chapters 4 and 5, continues
to some extent in chapter 6 where is merges into a comparison to Mark Twain
(See esp. p. 160 to end of chapter), and surfaces in a discussion of Kenneth
Burke in chapter 7. Of key importance is Miller's examination of Wright's
much longer unpublished drafts of MWLU. Central themes discussed are
guilt (100-109), death (110-113), Daniels as a Christ-like figure (115-118),
the ongoing war with fascism (119-120), race (120-122), and Promethean rebellion
(122-124). Chapter 5 concentrates on psychology (Freud and Jung).

Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His
Works (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), pp. 148-155. Discussion
of "The Man Who Lived Underground."

In spite of Wright's preoccupation with extremes of fear, violence, and
degradation, he has an optimistic streak which can be found in most of his
writing, even in the grim conclusions of works such as Native Son and
The Outsider. This story, however, is the exception. Perhaps mirroring
his imminent break with the Communist Party, here we find Wright at a nadir
of pessimism. Shorn of a political perspective, the bleak existential theme
takes over, in a world without redemption.

Gorky and Wright are the two modern writers who most inconvenience
the cultural separatists and sentimental populists among their own people.
No two major writers were raised closer to the folk who had recently risen
from bondage, and yet both Gorky and Wright rejected the vestiges of the traditional
peasant cultures of survival that had spawned them.(1) Both writers carried
the large psychic burden of the inside outsider, ever seeking to account for
the source of the rage and removal that made them so different. Ultimately
the pressure of Gorky's "bitter" knowledge forced him to imagine
and then to help canonize the positive hero of socialist realism, the universal
proletarian who would replace the ex-peasant has-beens (byvshie liudi) of
his early fiction. But Richard Wright's black-and-blue sensibility, the pain
of his profoundly alienated and wounded individuality, eventually led him
away from Gorky's faith in collectivist culture and social engineering. Sometime
around 1942 Richard Wright began to risk a desperate transcendentalism, an
absurd Dostoevskian faith in solitary leaps of consciousness that prefigured
the later existential humanism of his expatriate years in France.

Some important intertextual analysis, viz. Dostoevsky, Conrad, et al. Note
comparisons to Lukacs, Benjamin. Author agrees with Gilroy against misrepresentations
of Wright's engagement with European ideas. Reaches back to Native Son,
ahead to Black Boy and The Outsider. Author also sees this story
as a critique of the nihilistic literary/artistic avant-garde, the lone modernist.
Fred Daniels falls out of culture and its accepted values into nature. Daniels
holed up in his cave becomes the avant-garde artist, also witnessing the nihilistic
destruction of World War II. He morphs from contempt for the people in the
outer world to sympathy. Hence, after subverting acepted values, he also rejects
his new, amoral perspective of the alienated artist. In the end, Daniels rejects
both rationalism and irrationalism. Daniels, unlike his counterpart in Conrad,
cannot articulate his new perspective to the outside world upon his return.
But this story remains more hopeful.

There is much worth considering in this perspective, but there are some major
flaws in it. At no point does Daniels evince control or awareness as to the
true nature of his situation. He does experience a turning point when his
conscience is troubled after uniwttingly causing the suicide of the night
watchman. Guilt, his own and everyone's, becomes his overriding preoccupation.
He returns to the aboveground world to confess. It proves to be a futile exercise.
Daniels never gains a new perspective transcending that of society or of the
hallucinatory reality of his underground experience. The author also fails
to characterize the nature of Daniels' experience underground, in which he
gets a chance to appropriate the white world in an unreal manner.

Excellent article, starting from the premiseallegedly foreign to much
criticism  that the story must be read as both a naturalistic and an
existential fable. Fred Daniels undergoes a Christlike experiences in a godless
world, navigates between ordinary and existential guilt, assumes an amoral
godlike stance underground, which he ultimately rejects. Watkins concludes
that "that man is not simply a god in the existential sense or an animal
in the naturalistic sense; nor is man's existence the existence of a god or
an animal." Man's paradoxical existence is mirrored in the naturalistic
and symbolic levels on which this story is played out.

Watson sees Daniels as a Christ figure who rejects American "materialism"
and capitalism. This is a defective analysis. There is almost merit to the
analogy, but Daniels' behavior in and out of the sewer belies the comparison.

The story has been analyzed from a number of viewpoints and the journey of
Fred Daniels has a number of literary precedents. Story themes discussed are
laughter, guilt, the reversal of values of material and symbolic objects,
reemergence into the daylight, and the policeman's murder of Daniels.

Critical scrutiny of this story has been cursory at best. McNallie not only
cites the usually cited influences on Wright (esp. Dostoevsky) but analyzes
the story as an inverted version of Plato's allegory of the cave.

The author deplores the neglect and undervaluation of Wright's short fiction.
As do other critics, this one sees Fred Daniels as the next step beyond Bigger
Thomas. Daniels gains an inner knowledge the world does not want to know.